Citation Machine is one of the longest-running and best loved citation tools out there, but recently it hasn’t been so great.

We knew that we could do better, so we made our own bibliography tool called MyBib. We think it’s better than Citation Machine, so we’ve prepared a comparison to help you choose the best one for you. Here’s why we think you should use MyBib to create your citations:

1. MyBib is totally free (forever!)

Some citation tools charge a monthly subscription fee to use them because they’re run by companies and they need to make profits. MyBib isn’t a company — we’re a group of geeks from colleges across the country, and we built MyBib for the benefit of students only. This means we’ve made the entire tool completely free, including the features that other tools normally make you pay for.

2. No ads anywhere

Did you know that viruses and malware can get into your computer by pretending to be advertisements? It’s true, and it’s called malvertising. This is one of the reasons why you should be using an adblocker like uBlock (for Chrome and Firefox) — they don’t just block ads, but viruses too.

Fortunately, MyBib is 100% ad-free. We don’t show ads of any kind, and never will, so there’s zero risk of any malvertisements infecting your computer.

3. MyBib is exceptionally accurate

We use the same core citation code in MyBib that Zotero and Mendeley do — two professional-grade reference management tools used by doctoral students and researchers. This ensures that we can generate perfectly formatted citations that would be accepted in an academic journal.

Citation Machine, from our testing, doesn’t use the same formatting engine. And that matters because up to 20% of your grade for a paper can be attributed to its bibliography, so if your citations are missing vital information then you’re going to miss out on that A.

4. MyBib is quick and easy to use

We built MyBib to be as easy to use as possible, there’s no unnecessary steps here. Buttons work instantly and there are modern features like undo and print, too. In our speed tests MyBib was almost 4 times faster than other bibliography tools like Citation Machine.

MyBib works great on phones, tablets, laptops AND computers, and also has add-ons for your browser so that you can autocite websites, journals, and PDFs in a single click without leaving the page.

5. MyBib is open source

When we set out to make MyBib we wanted to be sure that the students using our tool would always come first, and there would never be any risk of MyBib disappearing or being covered in ads or worse. If we do something you don’t like, our code is available for you to start your own MyBib. We’d even suggest it.

We’re also hoping that others will contribute and help us build the best citation tool out there for the good of everyone. We built the tool that we wanted for ourselves, not for the benefit of a company.

Summary

So here’s the juicy bits:

MyBib is a great Citation Machine alternative if…

You want the best citation tool without paying a monthly subscription (or any money at all)

Ads suck and you hate them as much as we do

You rely on your citation generator to give you professional-quality citations

Being fast and easy to use is important to you

Hopefully by now you can see you should expect more from a citation tool, and click the blue button below to try our Citation Machine alternative for yourself.